Introduction

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez

Whether on the scale of a household, of a community, or of a much larger regional environment, spaces of human habitation are both historical records of our past and a key element in reproducing the knowledge and values that define our lives in the present. This process of cultural reproduction can be endangered when migration, displacement, or changes in property regimes limit communities' access to sites where they have important historical connections. Around the world, formal legal statutes, grassroots organizations, and local acts of resistance can play different roles in reasserting these connections between people and place. Accordingly, the claims that contemporary stakeholders make on archaeological sites and related landscape features extend beyond the simple desire for conservation or site preservation and include the rights to visit, inhabit, and even alter the physical composition of these spaces.

The essays in this volume are an interdisciplinary exploration of these intersections between the study and management of physical sites and the reproduction of intangible cultural legacies. Some chapters focus on more abstract theoretical insights into societies' relationship to different places and how this relationship figures in the reproduction of cultural continuities amidst processes of social change. Other essays turn to more pragmatic ways in which these insights figure in contemporary negotiations through which different groups seek greater access or control over culturally significant sites and landscapes. As a group, they are meant to provide a comparative body of case studies that explore the different ways in which place is mediated by social, political, and ecological processes that have deep historical roots and that continue to effect the politics of heritage management today.

The close relationship between physical space and more ephemeral manifestations of culture and social organization are a common thread joining diverse currents of anthropological and archaeological research. Since the rise of New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, archaeological research has focused on reconstructing long-term patterns of culture and social structure. Working "up" from the material traces of human behavior, the processualists and their various intellectual successors and competitors have been keenly attuned to the intimate and dynamic relationship between the materiality of space and the more intangible dimensions of human behavior and experience. In cultural and linguistic anthropology, a number of theoretical currencies that focus on the intersections of space and culture gained prominence in the 1990s and 2000s. These range from studies of the spatialization of collective memory that were inspired by the work of Pierre Norá (1989), to linguistic analyses of the intimate relationship between patterns of reference and the social organization of space (Hanks 1990), to studies of environment that focus on the intimate ties between evolving ecosystems and patterns of settlement and subsistence (Ford and Nigh 2015; Gordillo 2004; Wright 2014).

Many of the theoretical currencies that we listed above figure in the essays in this volume. But the case studies presented here are also joined by an overarching concern for stakeholders' access to culturally significant spaces. "Accessibility" becomes a question of crossing boundaries that are defined by regimes of private property, heritage legislation, and the eminent domain of modern nation-states. In this regard, these essays touch upon questions of spatial justice that figure in the tradition of cultural geography associated with Henri Lefebvre (1992), and later Anglophone authors such as David Harvey (1996) and Edward Soja (2011). These authors adapted the dialectical analysis of Western Marxism to explore the dynamic historical relationship between space and the social organization of human labor. Space was never simply an inert material template on which human social processes were enacted but was also a product of and agent in the processes of human history. Thus, landscapes were both a record of previous human interactions with the material world and an ontic component of ongoing processes through which society recreates itself. This dynamic relationship between the social and the spatial had important ramifications for the questions of social justice that were at the heart of this critical human geography. Full enjoyment of what it means to be in the world hinges on the equitable distribution of access to and stewardship over the spaces that define our historical experience.

As the essays in this volume show, these questions of accessibility and stewardship are becoming a guiding political and ethical concern for archaeologists and other scholars studying heritage sites and landscapes. Increasingly, international policy instruments and national legal reforms are granting recognition to the rights that diverse human communities have to preserve and publicly perform elements of their cultural heritage. However, when it comes to the role of designated heritage sites in promoting cultural continuities, researchers, stakeholders, and activists often face a series of legal and political tensions (Aikawa-Faure 2003; Gilman 2010).

Many of these tensions emerge from the fact that different legal principles tend to crosscut the concatenation of material, social, and cultural processes that constitute the heritage of different groups. That is, the formal regimes of property and political jurisdiction that govern the management of heritage rarely account for the intimate relationship between physical space and more intangible forms of heritage that shape the lives...